The Mushroom at the End of the World

This section covers Chapters 14-15: “Serendipity” and “Ruin.”

Trips through the forest are full of reminders of a vanished past when the timber companies flourished and offered reliable employment. The disappearance of one way of life does not make the landscape barren, however, as Tsing points out, “Mistakes were made […] but mushrooms popped up” (194).

In Oregon, Forest Service management is often resented as a government intrusion, though most land belongs either to their jurisdiction or that of timber companies. Agency employees stressed that many of their renewal initiatives failed, and that environmentalist goals were hard to reconcile with the continuing pressure to produce timber for a market. In the Cascade region of which Oregon is a part, pine and fir trees thrive because of the aftermath of a volcanic eruption and its impact on soil quality. Though matsutake now grow in partnership with lodgepole pine, this tree is absent from much of the region’s earlier history. Ponderosa pines, much larger, drove much of the early forestry boom, and it turned out that these could not easily be replanted after cutting, as Indigenous forestry practices were missing. Periodic burning of the forest had advantaged ponderosas, but US Forest policy banned such practices, and so ponderosas took hold in their place.

This history is intimately tied to colonization and deliberate displacement of Indigenous people, as the Klamath tribe was deprived of its forest rights in 1954, using the logic that the tribe’s wealth meant it no longer needed federal recognition or protection. Their forests were nationalized by the United States, and this caused demographic and social catastrophe, as monetary compensation given to the tribe was frequently also taken from them by unscrupulous actors. The tribe regained recognition in 1986 and has attempted to restore their stewardship over the forest land and water supply. Tsing notes that some tribe members now pick matsutake. In this account, the forces of capitalist progress drive resource depletion and destruction of Indigenous land and culture. This, then, is progress only for corporations, not all those who live or work in the Cascades. Though Tsing began by questioning the validity of progress narratives for all people, this story highlights that progress, at least in the United States, has been inextricably tied to race and a white quest for resource extraction.

Returning to the forests, Tsing considers the aftermath of progress: “If you look at the forest from above today on Google Earth, you see mainly swaths of lodgepole growing on old clear-cuts. It’s not a pretty sight. Turn-of-the-century critics—taking foresters by surprise—described eastern Cascade timber areas as ‘festering sores on the back of a mangy old dog’” (199). It grows well in cold weather and imperfect soil and grows especially well when forests are not managed through periodic ground fires, which burn much of it beyond recognition. When the trees live longer, as they do in the absence of fire, mushrooms have more time to grow in and around them. This is, “an unintended consequence of the most famous Forest Service mistake in the interior forests of the American West: the exclusion of fire” (201). Though the exclusion of Indigenous forest management was destructive on many levels, and Tsing does not in any way celebrate it, devastation does bear a kind of fruit.

The new forest poses its own unique management challenges, as the thick lodgepole pine may be especially hazardous in an age of possible forest fires. The Forest Service, also dealing with economic austerity, cannot pursue expensive solutions. Mushroom pickers resent the idea of the forests being thinned in any way, seeing a threat to their work. Surprisingly, the Forest Service began to explore lodgepole management strategies that would not harm the picker’s interests or the availability of matsutake. This was the result of intensive conversations, and Tsing stresses that it is not at all typical of forest bureaucracy: “To appreciate how strange this is, consider that no other nontimber forest product has attained the status of a management objective, at least in this part of the country. In a bureaucracy that sees only trees, a mushroom companion has made a splash appearance” (204). The mushroom makes a “splash” as a new arrival on the scene. Bureaucracy, in this vision, is an animated force, a living presence, and it too, has eyes to observe, just as Tsing does. Matsutake have become unignorable, even to otherwise rigid and rule-bound institutions, just as they have to anthropologists.

Tsing returns to broader questions of similarity and difference, pointing out that the revitalization of matsutake in Japan and Oregon depends on an economic reality. Demand for timber is low, so industrial forests are no longer a priority.

To emphasize her global narrative, Tsing turns to Southeast Asia. Logging there was a key part of Japanese postwar revitalization, as these forests were a major source of timber for Japanese companies. This produced “ruined” industrial landscapes in Japan, and Tsing suggests that in this case, overlap between forest histories is particularly noteworthy, since it does not produce similar environments, but may still reveal common truths about “global histories of industrial ruin” (206).

Tsing notes that in the early 20th century, bans and restrictions on burning forests to manage tree populations became common in Japan as well as Europe and the US, though in the American case private industry had a greater role in forest management. Later decades saw an expanded role for government bureaucracy, as timber production became linked to military goals in the years before and after World War II.

In Japan, government policy incentivized the growth of timber plantations, though domestic timber production was relatively brief. Eventually, fir wood from the United States (in fact, from Oregon) became cheaper, and generally drove out domestic production. By the 1970s and 1980s, wood came from Southeast Asia, and the new forests, overpopulated with deer and dense with pollen, were not a part of urban dwellers pursuit of leisure as the older forests had been. Bringing matsutake back into the story, Tsing comments that the pine forests that survived these decades thrived only because Japanese tree plantations were abandoned in favor of wood from Southeast Asia. Deforestation moves elsewhere, out of sight—though not out of the view of the anthropologist looking beyond the nation state and for interlocking commodity chains.

The 1970s are a moment of convergence between ruins: the decline of Oregon’s forest industry is also traceable to global competition. Oregon pine was not sold as cheaply as wood form Southeast Asia, so Japanese companies went elsewhere. In both Japan and the United States, these displacements and disruptions created conditions conducive to mushroom picking. Tsing insists, however, that this is not a story of celebration for her, but an example of how pervasively deforestation shapes many parts of the world: “If all our forests are buffeted by such winds of destruction, whether capitalists find them desirable or throw them aside, we have the challenge of living in that ruin, ugly and impossible as it is” (214). Tsing searches less for hope than for truth. There can be no survival without a clear survey of the landscape, whether that landscape is the sometimes-unseen force of capitalist mechanisms, or the very literal trees she explores during her fieldwork. Tsing concludes, “To write a history of ruin, we need to follow broken bits of many stories and to move in and out of many patches” (214). Tsing’s philosophy of history is, like her view of economics, resistant to uniformity and progress. Ruin is where humanity finds itself, and thus, a worthy subject of study. She does not, interestingly, argue that broken or ruined landscapes can or should be repaired. It may be too late for this, and all that remains is an unflinching account of the diversity capitalism has not eradicated.